


"Love, Aldo"

by warmommy



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: Dyslexia, F/M, Letters, Love Letters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 15:00:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13837215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmommy/pseuds/warmommy
Summary: Aldo has three things to his name: a team of swarthy Jewish men; a nice Quaker assault(wo)man; and dyslexia.





	"Love, Aldo"

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find this and a lot more at my tumblr, warmommy.tumblr.com!

“Hey, Evans!” Aldo Raine took off his hat and looked around. Kagan and Wicki were arguing over how to properly start a fire, again, and he didn’t feel like intervening in that. Most of the tents were already pitched. Donovan was already off, probably puking his guts up, after that latest round of Kill the Krauts. Kid wanted them dead more than most, but Aldo was growing concerned. When she didn’t appear, Aldo frowned and sat on a moss-covered stone. “Mercy!”

“I had to get my paper, Lieutenant.” She was at his left suddenly, and sat cross-legged and the ground below him. She sharpened her pencil with the same knife she used to collect his Nazi scalps and looked up at him.

Long time ago, when he was a kid, Aldo was promptly labeled as a dumbass because of all the trouble he had reading and writing. Nobody had ever heard of dyslexia around the parts he was from, and it wasn’t until he was older that he’d gotten the help and support he’d needed to catch up to his own intellect, in terms of the written word. He loved to read, once he was properly able, but he hated to write. Good thing he had a nice kid in his team with neat penmanship who technically had to do whatever he told her.

“Hang on,” he said, handing her three envelopes. “Read these to me, Merce, do me a favour. Don’t sit on the ground, either, you’re not a damn dog.”

She stood, dusted herself off, and took the letters from him with a bit of trepidation, like she wasn’t supposed to.

“If I was worried about you knowin’ what was in ‘em, I wouldn’t have asked,” Aldo pointed out to her. “Open ‘em up, now, ain’t got all day to worry about correspondences.”

“Oh, okay, yes, sir.” Mercy cleared her throat and opened the first along the edge with her fingernail. Carefully, she blew into the envelope and slid the paper out into her palm. She shifted her knees, placing the letter down over her pad and paper, and cleared her throat once more.

> _Dear Aldo,_
> 
> _It does not feel like an entire year since the last time you visited home, but the azaleas are starting to bloom again, and there’s no one here to put them in the vase on the kitchen table. I’m sitting here in the same chair, looking at the sunlight from the window over the sink hitting the same vase that’s been there since you were born. Do you remember when you were a kid, and Juniper would help you put them in fresh every day of spring?_
> 
> _I know that it seems as though I’m rambling now, but there are many ways that I feel time is moving out of sync with the world. Here is spring, but no azaleas on the table, no pesky little brother. You have always had the adventurer’s spirit. Myself and Juniper always knew, speculated together, that you would go off and be a great man someday, do great things. Although they are secrets, I know these things you do are greater than we have ever imagined._
> 
> _It is hard to imagine a child you raised as your own as a fully grown man running around with a knife between his teeth. I miss you, as dones Juniper, and, of course, Methuselah. You are the one who taught him to say such blasphemies, of course. You shit._
> 
> _Always loving and missing you,_
> 
> _Marigold Raine ♡_

“All right, we gotta respond to that one first, ‘fore I forget what all I got to say,” Aldo said. “You ready?”

Mercy nodded, gave him the re-folded letter, and picked up her pencil.

> _Mary,_
> 
> _As pointless as this is to say, or, rather, write, don’t worry about me. The weather is better around this area, which I would disclose, but it would just get redacted by censors, anyway. It may not seem right or fair that you spent such a long time raising me up and now feel like I don’t need you anymore, but it’s not true. Not for you or Juni._
> 
> _I have a good team with me, and we’re doing the sort of work that carries our spirits. It’s work we all believe in, and that’s a lot more than most men (and women, apologies to my technician, who is graciously taking down this letter for me) in uniform get to say. We’re knocking the dog shit out of Nazis, just like I told you I would, for you, me, and the Jews._
> 
> _Every time and thing I hear about home makes me wish I was back there, even more. Tennessee’s always on my mind, and I’ll be back. You know I will.. Might even bring a nice French girl home with me so you don’t have to worry about me all that much anymore._
> 
> _Love,_
> 
> _Aldo_

Mercy folded the paper carefully and passed it over to him to put in an envelope later. He thought she smiled at him. Maybe she did. She read the other two letters, one from Juni, saying that Mary was acting strangely, which he just chalked up to the kind of blues a lady could get sometimes when their baby birds fly the nest. The third was a lot more, well, colourful, and Mercy laughed every few words–his uncle was a character. She laughed a lot at Aldo’s response, too, and he liked it. The sound of her laughter. It was pretty, like Juni’s wooden wind chime that Aletha had brought back from Indonesia. She smiled and waited to be dismissed, and Aldo didn’t realise at first that that was what was happening. It just seemed like she was staring, for a second there.

“Yeah, yeah.” Aldo dug around in his pack for the envelopes he needed, happy and frustrated at the same time to have his eyes off of Mercy. No, Evans. He patted her on the arm a few times. “Off you go.”

* * *

The reason that he chose Mercy for his team was not because of her Judaism, because she was not one. Mercy was a Pennsylvania Quaker, matter of fact, it went back generations in her family. He met her by chance. She was like a beautiful dewdrop on a blade of the greenest grass, or, at least, that was the impression he’d gotten. Her clothes and helmet were too big for her, but she was trying very hard to clean and assemble her gun with efficiency and speed. She just kept doing it, over and over again, and, after twenty or so minutes, Aldo had walked over to her and asked her if she wanted a job.

He found out a lot about her that day, a lot that he liked very much. When he asked her what had possessed a petite Quaker girl from four thousand miles away to join the Army, she had corrected him. Not the Army, but the cause. She believed that volunteering to fight in Europe for the Jewish people was what was right, and, in doing so, had been banished from the church community she had grown up in, and lost her family, too.

Nineteen. Just nineteen years old. Aldo had told her he’d help her fill her paperwork out for her transfer into OSS employ, and under hazard pay and insurance, she’d named several charities as her beneficiaries.

Right then, that was when he discovered he was in deep shit. He was in far too deep shit to climb out, but he did not want to sink deeper into said shit. He named the bubble in his chest ‘admiration’ rather than ‘love’ and told himself he thought that she was ‘cute’ and not ‘pure and beautiful’.

It had to work out that way, anyway. Whether he wanted it to or not. On a lot of levels, an attraction to Mercy Evans just did not do, chiefly among those his own age, his rank and hers, the fact that he was her commanding officer, the list went on, and it went on…

He still caught himself looking at her, a year later. She was the only other Gentile he knew who was willing to give up everything–no, she’d lost more than him–to do what was right. She felt the same things in her heart as he did–no, that was his own presumption, and Aldo chastised himself for it all the time.

He still looked at her, though. Her hands were a deep burgundy red, her eyes were the sweetest soft brown he’d ever seen, her hair was often seen underneath Hirschberg’s beret, because she stole the damn thing all the time, and hell, it couldn’t hurt, could it? Just to appreciate some sunshine on a rainy day?

Except that wasn’t all he did, and Aldo knew that, too. He imagined her like honeysuckle, something with droplets of sweetness, pulled from the vine. She ran around looking like a damn street rat with blood caked on her hands, dirt on her face, her hands constantly gripped around a rifle that hung from a strap over her shoulder and still drove him ‘round the bend with a kind of lust he didn’t know how to account for–he just knew it was there, and hell, it couldn’t hurt, could it? These ideas, these images, these fantasies, locked inside his own mind, in his own imagination, he’d never let them touch her. Only him.

“Goddamn it,” Aldo grumbled underneath his breath, these thoughts circulating through his brain yet again.

Donny was nearby, heard him. “Yeah? What is it, Lieutenant?”

Aldo looked over at him, frowned, and looked at the fire again. “Shut the fuck up, Donny.”

* * *

 

Goddamn, why was there never mail? Aldo was beginning to hunger for it like he did for real food, shit that wasn’t sealed in grey packets, formless, and, when they were lucky, tasteless. This time of year, at least, there were orchards and lots of game running around, so they got opportunities to round out their diet. Aldo had just come back empty handed after tracking a deer all damn day when that gangly fucking Austrian came up to him, holding out a newspaper.

“I know it’s in German, but look at this guy. He killed thirteen Gestapo officers. They almost didn’t catch him at all. It says over and over he’s a Jew sympathizer, that he works for or with Jews,” Wicki said. “And he’s not far.”

A week later and he had a German with a sourpuss on his hands, and Aldo should never have listened to that damn Wicki. Hugo Stiglitz brought firepower and enthusiasm for Nazi-killing that Aldo had not even anticipated, himself, but he also brought a big fuckin’ problem. That dickhead interrupted his mail time with Mercy. His loud accusation was that Aldo was treating one of his soldiers like a secretary, and that if Aldo was so damn inept, Hugo himself would read and write his letters.

Aldo could get past those bits, he really could, those bits where the FNG tries to size up the CO, his strange little outbursts. What he couldn’t abide was that little ass licker letter-blocking him.

Sure, maybe he’d have found Hugo’s apparent attempts at chivalry quite admirable. He seemed to give some token shit about ensuring that she was treated fairly as a soldier. Quite admirable indeed, if Aldo weren’t aching for twenty minutes of uninterrupted Mercy. It didn’t do for him to have long and jocular discussions with the only female member of his team for no reason, and that son of a bitch Hun had taken away his reason.

The longer he’d gone without the easy and relaxing company of their resident Quaker, the more it set Aldo’s nose out of joint. He fucking missed her. There were so many little things he’d never even realised that he’d miss–the freckles on her nose, the way the sun kissed even more of  them on her face, chest, shoulders, and arms. Blood spatter hanging around those light constellations, washed away with a wet cloth while sitting around the fire and talking with Donny and Hirschberg. The waviness to her dark hair when she shook out her braid every few days, how it reached the middle of her back.

She’d even been visiting his dreams. Once, particularly realistic, she came to him in his tent in the middle of the night–it wasn’t realistic that she was dressed in lingerie, fine, but the rest of it was. The Mercy of his dreams laid out on top of him, invited his hands to roam, and kissed him so warmly. Came in his sleep like a teenager, woke up immediately afterward fearing there was actually someone else in the tent with him. After flailing around enough to show himself that he was the only one, and the tent was still sealed, Aldo sat up, breathing hard, and considered what the hell he was supposed to do.

“Goddamn.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find this and a lot more at my tumblr, warmommy.tumblr.com!


End file.
